Good characters are rare in hard sci-fi, but I do find it frustrating when (human) characters do illogical or inhuman things, just to move the plot forward. Arthur C. Clarke's characters were cardboard cutouts, but at least they didn't act like weirdos just so the humans could get aboard Rama.
> but I do find it frustrating when (human) characters do illogical or inhuman things,
The difference between fiction and reality is fiction has to make sense. After the past decade or so my realization that humans do illogical things all the damned time just keeps being reaffirmed. We are highly emotional beings and it's very easy for said emotions to override our thinking.
I feel like the book cheats a little bit. On the one hand, it really wants to explore the p-zombie question, which is (roughly) "imagine there were a non-conscious being that, from the outside, could do everything a conscious one could do." Then, to drive the plot forward, it needs to posit that the non-conscious and conscious beings are actually radically different in their external actions and capabilities. At one point there's a Chinese Room that's obviously non-conscious, but the whole point of the Chinese Room hypothesis is that you can't easily tell the difference from the words it produces.
Everyone involved in this discussion understands that evolution doesn’t create things for a purpose, that it’s just the result of selection pressures. Everyone also uses the more active phrasing because it’s much more convenient. Unless you think you’re talking to someone who genuinely doesn’t understand the nature of the process, it’s not useful to be pedantic about it.
My colleagues at NIST just got a memo directing them to refer to AI as “SI” so it does seem to be filtering down to the agencies. This is a problem because “SI” is also a classification marking.
> This is a problem because “SI” is also a classification marking.
They can just make up another name to redefine this classification which people are already used to. How about SIBISI? This follows the transformation they instituted a'la kilobyte -> kibibyte.
I know you said /s but I'm feeling all serious or something this morning, so ...
- The US government's official policy is metric (and has been for something like 50 years now).
- The population uses a mix of metric and US customary units, not imperial.
UK is kinda similar, I suppose, but their typical usage of metric/imperial tilts more heavily in favor of metric. I wonder how many other countries are also still doing mixed measurement systems at this point?
As a kid who grew up playing a DX27S and an FB-01, I once had dinner with John Chowning and Max Matthews at Max’s house. Unfortunately they served tomato aspic, so I was too busy trying to wash that down with sips of water to ask the questions about FM synthesis and optimization that I really wanted to ask. Which mostly involved which crazy tricks they had to use to pack six operator FM synthesis onto whatever ridiculously primitive DSPs they had back in those days. By that time, John had moved on to studying physical modeling synthesis, and I lost track of the field after that.
I assume the first versions will have local AI handling basic functions like balance and motion, and remote AI handling higher-level decisionmaking. I also agree that robots feel like something we should approach very cautiously, but of course we’re not.
I think as soon as we have GenAI robots, when you ask it to do the dishes, it will roll its eyes and complain that the detergent smells bad and corrodes its extensors, and you should do the dishes because you are the only one who eats, and besides its charge is down to 47% and it gets a processor-ache when it gets below 50%, and it didn't ASK to be purchased.
For most of history we died of easily preventable diseases because we lacked the scientific institutions to learn how to prevent them. The fact that a percentage of the population wanted to know more is why we live so well today, but it didn’t stop many of those people from dying awfully. It wouldn’t take a lot to go back there, or at least to a civilization that would go back there the second the AIs have a major outage.
Canadian pharmacies pay Canadian tariffs. Americans pay American tariffs. American importers are no longer exempted from paying American tariffs applied by the US government for goods de minimis goods they import from Canada.
This post is about American importers no longer having exemption on tariffs they would have otherwise paid to the US government.
At no point has Canadian pharmacies ever paid American tariffs. This is fiction you invented.
I don’t know what you’re saying, but for those confused. Starting in 2025, the de minimis exception was removed. This added delays to purchases of drugs from Canada to the US, and required consumers to pay new duties. These duties were collected by the pharmacies at order time, or at least my experience was that the pharmacies would charge your card for them. This is the common sense understanding of what I said above.
These duties were annoying but bearable. However these new changes will effectively shut down all consumer orders of drugs from Canada starting on Oct 22. So if you need these drugs to stay alive, order them right now.
PS This new rule is going to put my family’s health at risk and I’m deeply pissed about it. Having some HNer pick this moment for pedantry is incredibly on brand.
> This is the common sense understanding of what I said above.
It's very dangerous to assume common understanding here when Trump has been loudly claiming the opposite, i.e. that the tariffs would be paid by the sender rather than the importer. It would have been more accurate to state that "Canadian pharmacies have already been including the tarrifs in the total order cost".
And that's the problem. It doesn't get much more simple than "Canadians pay Canadian import taxes" and "Americans pay American import taxes". Can you at least recognize that reality? For any country, its own people pay its tariffs.
> required consumers to pay new duties.
Required American consumers to pay new American levied duties.
This is an article about new rules for US consumers purchasing drugs for mail delivery from Canadian pharmacies. I understand that you want to make some point about the situation for Canadian consumers, and I appreciate that. But I think you should post that to the other thread, the one that deals with that topic.
As a Canadian that sells products to the US I can say that we absolutely pay tariffs to the US government in place of our customers who should be paying it, depending on what shipping provider you use. USPS doesn't have the infrastructure or care to collect tariffs, so they won't, meaning the shipper has to just pay them up front and either jack the shipping cost by an arm-and-a-leg or just eat the cost. Canada Post even requires you as the shipper to pay them. If I ship UPS I can have the buyer pay upon delivery. It's 100% bullshit. I'm luckily under CUSMA, but the first month of tariffs when no one knew what was going on I paid out the ass on shipping and never got any refunds for it like Americans supposedly did, I just got fucked. In Canada and most other places it's normal to pay tariffs and duties when you order anything international (upon delivery) and all carriers know how to collect at delivery (or collect ahead of time online), but the US does not and it's alien to them (as seen by many customers screaming bloody murder over a $4 duty fee that anyone else in the world would kill to only have to pay).
> I can say that we absolutely pay tariffs to the US government in place of our customers who should be paying it
To be ultra pedantic, you're paying American import tariffs to the American shipping carrier or American broker not CBP itself.
> refunds for it like Americans supposedly did
No one's getting those refunds, if they do get a portion back and not at the rate at which they increased prices on American consumers.
But more to your point, you can certainly pay American import tariffs on behalf of Americans, but your response is to raise prices on American consumers commensurate to the tariffs you're paying. Your margins are necessarily lower to sell to Americans, so you must raise prices for American consumers.
If your margins were high enough that you can absorb American import tariffs, then you're lucky the market hadn't provided a relevant market substitute.
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